Naomi Wolf is a best-selling author and one-time Democratic Party insider who stood at the shoulders of Bill Clinton and Al Gore during their respective presidential campaigns. She was the great figurehead of 1990s "third wave" feminism; an inspiration to a generation of young progressive women.

All of a sudden, she is rethinking her feminist, rationalist worldview. She concluded that world events since 2020 can only be explained by the reality of a Great Controversy going on between good and evil. She is correct. Somebody get her the book, please!

In a recent article Have the Ancient Gods Returned? she observes the rapid rise of neo-paganism in our culture, identifying it with the ‘ancient gods’ of paganism. Here is part of her article:

“These days, to my surprise, people want to talk to me about evil.

In an essay last year, and in my book The Bodies of Others, I raised a question about existential, metaphysical darkness.

I concluded that I had looked at the events of the past three years using all of my classical education, my critical thinking skills, my knowledge of Western and global history and politics; and that, using these tools, I could not explain the years 2020-present.

Indeed I could not explain them in ordinary material, political or historical terms at all.

This is not how human history ordinarily operates.

I could not explain the way the Western world simply switched, from being based at least overtly on values of human rights and decency, to values of death, exclusion and hatred, overnight, en masse — without resorting to reference to some metaphysical evil that goes above and beyond fallible, blundering human agency.

When ordinary would-be-tyrants try to take over societies, there is always some flaw, some human impulse undoing the headlong rush toward a negative goal. There are always factions, or rogue lieutenants, in ordinary human history; there is always a miscalculation, or a blunder, or a security breach; or differences of opinion at the top.

Mussolini’s power was impaired in his entry to the Second World War by being forced to share the role of military commander with King Victor Immanuel. Hitler miscalculated his ability to master the Russian weather — right down to overlooking how badly his soldiers’ stylish but flimsy uniforms would stand up to extreme cold. Before he could mount a counter-revolution against Stalinism, Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City in his bath.

But none of that fracturing or mismanagement of normal history took place in the global rush to “lockdowns,” the rollout of COVID hysteria, of “mandates,” masking, of global child abuse, of legacy media lying internationally at scale and all lying in one direction, of thousands of “trusted messengers” parroting a single script, and of forced or coerced mRNA injections into at least half of the humans on Planet Earth.

I reluctantly came to the conclusion that human agency alone could not coordinate a highly complicated set of lies about a virus, and propagate the lies in perfect uniformity around an entire globe, in hundreds of languages and dialects. Human beings, using their own resources alone, could not have turned hospitals overnight from having been places in which hundreds of staff members were united in and collectively devoted to the care of the infirm, the prolongation and salvation of human life, the cherishing of newborns, the helping of mothers to care for little ones, the support of the disabled, to killing factories in which the elderly were prescribed “run-death-is-near (Remdesivir)” at scale.

Also look at the speed of change. Institutions turned overnight into negative mirror images of themselves, with demonic policies replacing what had been at least on the surface, angelic ones. Human-history change is not that lightning fast.

The perception of the rollout, the unanimity of a mass delusion, cannot in my view be explained fully by psychology; not even as a “mass formation.” There have been other mass hysterias before in history, from “blood libel” – the widespread belief in medieval Europe that Jews were sacrificing Christian children to make matzo, to the flareup of hysteria around witches in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, to the “irrational exuberance” of Tulipmania, also in the 17th century, in the Netherlands, detailed by Scottish journalist Charles MacKay in his classic account of group madness, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841).

But all of these examples of mass frenzy had dissidents, critics, and skeptics at the time; none of these lasted for years as a dominant uninterrupted delusional paradigm.

What we have lived through since 2020 is so sophisticated, so massive, so evil, and executed in such inhumane unison, that it cannot be accounted for without venturing into metaphysics. Something else, something metaphysical, must have done that. And I speak as a devoted rationalist and third generation feminist.

I concluded that I was starting to believe in God in more literal terms than I had before, because this evil was so impressive; so it must be directed at something at least as powerful that was all good.

At the time I wrote my initial essay, I knew that “Satan” was, at least for me, an insufficient explanation for the evil I saw. One reason that I felt that “Satan” was an insufficient name for what we were facing is that I am Jewish, and we don’t have the same tradition of “Satan” that Christian Western culture inherits and takes for granted.

In Jewish tradition, this entity’s role is not that of the rather majestic adversary of God who appears fully-fledged in the Christian tradition — an elaborated character who was developed subsequent to, as some scholars point out, the influence of Zoroastrianism on Judaism, and then on Christianity, in the years leading up to and after Jesus’ life and death.

In the Old Testament, in contrast, “the Satan” or “ha-Satan” — “the accuser” makes a number of appearances; but “ha-satan” is an opponent, rather than being the majestic villain of the New Testament, and of course of Dante and Milton’s characterizations, that so influenced Western ideas of “the devil.”

The great genius of America was not that it was consecrated to a specific religion — the genius of our nation included freedom of religion — but our distinction was that we were founded as a City on a Hill; spiritually; we were consecrated, via our ultimate organizational manifestation of human freedom, with its basis in free will — to God.

If we withdraw our role in that covenant, perhaps Pastor Cahn is right and pagan entities, long held at bay in the West – are empowered, and rush back in.

And so decency, human rights, human values, all of which we thought were innate secular Western values – turn out to be values that cannot be protected enduringly without the blessing of what has been in the West, a Judeo-Christian God. They are all being cleared out of our society, and almost no one — certainly very few people who are not people of faith — are standing in the breach as this takes place.

Now look at our political leaders, our national structures in the West. They went overnight from ethically oriented, at least overtly, to purely nihilistic, organizations. Before 2020, Judeo-Christian norms had not entirely left the West, even though explicit religious language was no longer invoked in its public spaces.

What I mean is that until 2020, Biblical belief systems structured our institutions even though we no longer explicitly invoked God.

The Bible is all around us in the West — or it has been — even though we think we are living in a postmodern reality. We have been blind to its influence, for the most part.

The idea that you should seek peace with your neighbors with whom you disagree, rather than trying to harm them or their children; the notion that a court should deliver impartial justice rather than hand over goods to the more powerful litigant; the idea that the poor and orphaned in a community should be cared for, rather than enslaved or left to starve; these were not the norms of the pagan world.

These are, rather, Biblical beliefs, even though the explicit Judeo-Christian religiosity has been removed from public discourse.

We don’t leave babies to starve — at least we didn’t kill living babies before 2020 — for a reason; our courts at least ostensibly don’t allow cheating or theft in our society, for a reason; we don’t abandon the elderly to the modern equivalent of wild animals — for a reason; and the reasons derive straight from the Ten Commandments; and from both the Old and New Testaments. These of course shaped our institutions for millennia even though we think these institutions now are secular.

Though secular, in the West, until 2020, our institutions have retained a Biblical, not a pagan, shape.

Congresses, Parliaments, nonprofits, were organized along what were basically Judeo-Christian ethical frameworks, even though the explicit religious language is no longer part of public discourse. Respect for human rights, the equal value of all, the cherishing of life, the seeking of a peaceful society — while our institutions were far from perfect, these were our institutional values, in the West, at least overtly, until 2020.

All of that changed seemingly overnight.

Since 2020 the world, I feel, has been bathed, infused, bombarded even, with intensely powerful energies that are totally unfamiliar to us in this generation, but that may derive from a pre-Christian, pre-solidly-Jewish time, a time when early Judaism was struggling with the seductive and oppressive entities that always sought to seduce the Children of Israel away from the monotheistic truth, the One God.

The ancient “demons” are the only “principalities and powers” I can imagine that are capable of manifesting a national, and now a global, network of policy advocates, social workers, graphic designers, Members of Parliament, who are all on board with an escalating euthanasia death cult. The ancient “pagan demons” are the only entities I can imagine powerful enough in just two years and a bit, to destroy families, to ruin sexuality and fertility, to make a mockery of human rights, to celebrate the end of critical thinking, to march us all in lockstep to worship of technocrats and technocracy; medical cultism and an orgiastic cult of self- and other-annihilation.

And — I must notice — if these “shedim” or “daimones” are powerless — why are their symbols reappearing everywhere? I used to see fundamentalist Christians who warned of Satan lurking in rock and roll, as fanatics. But what I myself am seeing around me, I cannot unsee.

A Temple of Baal archway was in fact expensively reconstructed from its original in Syria, and moved to a appear at a major thoroughfare in London, and was now unveiled in Washington, DC, and in New York. Why?

A bizarre opening ceremony in a new train site in Switzerland, at which European leaders were present, included a horned entity (“an Ibex”), the upholding of a symbolic lamb, the appearance of a terrifying angel, and the writhing of nearly naked men and women in S-and-M-themed and bondage postures..

Katy Perry’s performance in 2015, in which she performs astride a massive mechanical lion, directly echoed the symbology of Ishtar/Asherah, down to her iconic stance. Why?

Sam Smith’s Pfizer-fueled “Unholy,” bathed in lurid red light, with its Satanic imagery, takes the Grammys, and Billboard respectfully gets a quote from the Church of Satan while mocking the “pearl-clutching” of conservatives. Why?

A terrifying animated bull figure with glowing red eyes, is apparently worshiped by scantily-dressed male and female dancers, at the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony in Birmingham, England in 2022. This is just bizarre. Why?

The bull was once a symbol of Ba’al.

“SatanCon” is coming to Boston, 2023, and is getting fairly respectful coverage in the Boston Globe. A highlight of the upcoming conference? “Abortion as a (Religious) Right.” The Globe raises no questions about this gathering. Why?

A statue has been erected to honor the late Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Inexplicably, it has horns and tentacles. Why?

I could go on and on. Once you see the occult, Satanic, pre-Christian, dark or “daimonistic” themes re-establishing themselves in Western society, you cannot unsee them.

As poet Charles Baudelaire pointed out, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The only thing that feels intuitive to me is that these pagan forces may indeed once again have gained a foothold again on our planet.

What feels intuitive to me is that God is at the limit of His patience with us.

And He has said, Okay, you want to do it yourself? Do it yourself. And He let us go.

And that this — the absence of the protection of our God – the ascendancy of a realm on Earth of us doing it all ourselves; regarding ourselves; worshiping ourselves, whoring after only human works; releasing ourselves from all lawful constraints, embracing all lusts and all obedience to non-divine authorities; rejecting mercy; celebrating all narcissisms; treating children like animals whom we own, treating the family like a battlefield; treating the Churches and Synagogues as marketing platforms — this is, indeed what the realms of pagan darkness; or of Principalities and Powers – look like.

This may, indeed, be what Hell itself looks like.”